Creative Miss Caitlyn

Caitlyn has the gift of creativity. She loves to draw, paint, cut, color, decorate, craft...the sky's the limit.

Here are some of her creations.

For Valentines she made little dangler hearts to hang from our dining room light, and also made hearts to hang from the ceiling so it would be "raining hearts".

She's amazing at cutting out detailed little shapes and pictures, like this picture from a coloring book that she colored and cut out (all by herself with her little preschooler scissors).

Her favorite thing right now is playdough because she loves to watch little videos on YouTube of people making things like Disney characters and stuff out of playdough.

We love your happy, creative spirit Caitlyn! Keep up the good work!

Whoa.

My last post was from Halloween? Clearly it's time for a new post. Or two. So since Benjamin started walking like a pro a couple weeks ago (before that he was walking like a novice -- take a few steps and decide it's faster to crawl), I'll post a video of him doin' his thing. Love you Benny!

Birthday Boy

So when Quinn turned 30 we were living in Virginia and I threw him a big surprise birthday party. He enjoyed it so much that I decided to do it again this year for his 33rd birthday. Sadly, a few days before the party I asked him what time he would be coming home from work and whether he had any requests for dinner (just to throw him off the trail even though I'd already spend two weeks planning the party menu). To my surprise he said, "You know what I really want to do? I really want to go to Chuck E Cheese! I always wanted to go when I was a kid." Hmm... at first I just played along and continued with my plan. But when he kept talking about how excited he was as his birthday got closer and closer, I decided I better say something.
I initially attempted to maintain the surprise and just tell him the kids and I had already planned something fun, so could we go to Chuck E Cheese the next night? But then he said, "You didn't plan a party or something did you? Because I would really rather just do something with our family." So I finally had to say "Quinn! I planned a big party and invited over 30 people and already bought most of the food and rented the clubhouse and everything! I'm sorry, I'll never do it again, but for this year can you please attend your not-so-surprise party?" Ha ha! He was not super excited about it, but he showed up like a good sport. And after it was over he said, "That was actually really fun! Thanks hon, you went to a lot of work for that." Which was deeeeeefinitely true.
Unfortunately, I was so focused on making sure everything went smoothly during the party that I only took one, single, solitary picture. A picture of the birthday cake. And Nathan is the only member of our family that even made it into that single picture. So I have no pictures of all the fun decorations and all the wonderful friends and all the great food. BUT I did take some post-fact pictures a couple days later, so here they are:

Quinn's birthday breakfast before he left for work. His mom sent Batman decorations so Cait and I had fun decorating that morning before he came out for breakfast.

The birthday cake. I promise the rest of the clubhouse looked a lot nicer than this table looks in this picture.

Some of the activities I had prepared to keep little guests busy at the kids table.

My favorite decoration. A chronological collage of pictures from Quinn's 33 years and counting.

A few games and activities for the party -- nothing too fancy. 

So Quinn, I'm glad you had fun after all! And yes, we did go to Chuck E Cheese the next night and had a blast there too. :-)

I'm a witch-ch-ch, I'm a witch-ch-ch, with a pointed hat on my head

Did anyone else love singing that song in elementary school?

We had a blast this Halloween, and waaaaay too much candy. First we went to a trunk-or-treat at Caitlyn's school the Thursday before and made a haul. Then we went trick-or-treating at Seaworld the Saturday before and made another haul. (Have I ever mentioned how much we love and adore Seaworld? I love living two miles away from it and being able to say, "Hey does anybody want to go to Seaworld for a couple of hours?" whenever I want to.)
On Halloween night we went trick-or-treating with some of our friends from our old ward. Whoa baby! You know how there are entire neighborhoods that go above and behind with Christmas lights? Well, apparently this neighborhood goes above and beyond with Halloween. They even had a porta-potty on the street because so many people migrate to their neighborhood for the evening. People had set up outdoor fire places to sit around while handing out candy, one couple even had a candle-lit dinner with wine set up on their driveway to enjoy while handing out candy, almost every house was decked out in major Halloween decor. It was amazing.

Nathan was hilarious. He was a little hesitant at first, but once he got the routine down he was ducking and swerving in and out of the crowds of kids with laser-like focus to get to the person handing out candy. After a few houses he even started scouting out different bowls or boxes, like if they had a back up bowl behind them or a stock of candy in a box off to the side. He'd get the candy they were handing out and then go over to the back-up box and look up at them expectantly. It took some serious convincing that we only got one piece of candy at each house, even if there were additional sources of candy in sight.

Sadly, my phone broke before I could get this post up so the pictures I had of Ben in his little pumpkin costume are lost and gone forever. But luckily my friend had taken a couple on her camera so I have this one of Cait in her witch costume. 

Benny McBenster

Two months and three requests later...I'm finally forcing myself to sit down, get some pictures off my phone and onto the computer, and post some pictures of Benjamin. Keep scrolling down for a couple other new posts too.

 Benny is the happiest little guy, always smiling. Luckily for everyone involved, he's pretty content and usually happy to hang out in the bouncer or his crib while I help the older two with something, cook a meal, etc.

Caitlyn and Nathan LOVE Benjamin and are almost always super careful and gentle with him.

Here's a video of Benny havin' some tummy time. Warning: this will probably be pretty boring to anyone who is not either a parent or a grandparent of Benjamin...just a heads up. This video is from about a month ago, so he's moved on to bigger and better things now, like rocking back on his knees and army crawling. I'll try to post a more current video soon.

Cait is 4!

My baby turned 4! How can that BE?? We had a blast though. 

We started the day with the traditional wake-up gift and then had a yummy breakfast of Almond Banana pancakes. (Excuse the shirtlessness. Undies and jammies are one and the same in the summer.)

Among other gifts, Cait got a job chart for her birthday and was really excited to be old enough to have her very own jobs. It's been about a month now and she has been an AWESOME job-doer. A lot of the time I don't even need to remind her anymore.

Grandma Disparte send Caitlyn some birthday money so I took her to the store to pick out what she wanted to buy with it. She chose a Princess "T-roar-a" dress. (She calls Princess Aurora from Sleeping Beauty "T-roar-a".)

She also got a birthday package from Grandma and Grandpa Sitthichai, and she's insisted on taking her preschool book to school in her backpack every day.

A couple weeks before her party Caitlyn helped me back the cakes for her birthday cake and freeze them so we wouldn't have to worry about baking and cleaning up the day before or the day of the party. You can see that Caitlyn REALLY loves helping me cook. Licking the bowl is a tough job, but somebody's gotta do it right?

Cait chose to have an "Ocean" themed party. Probably because we were at SeaWorld when I was asking her what kind of cake she wanted. So we had a treasure hunt as one of the activities, and this is the treasure chest the kids found at the end of the clues. We also played "fish" where the kids threw their fishing pole over a blanket and I hooked on a sand toy and threw it back over. Kind of like at the 4th and 24th of July celebrations at the park.

What would an ocean-themed party be without sea creatures dangling for the ceiling?

Caitlyn also helped me make this banner in the days before the party. Seriously, shopping and getting ready for the party was at least 70% of the fun!

We had a goldfish cracker bar (in the sand pails), tuna salad sandwich bites, ocean blue punch, and of course, the ocean themed cake. Those little white seashells Caitlyn and I made using a molds we found at Michaels and melting chocolate. Yum....

Cait had a blast with a bunch of her little friends, all of whose parents are also good friends of ours, which made it a blast for us too. 

At the end of the party we changed the kids into their swimsuits and all went out to the pool. The dads all got in the pool and hot tub with the kids, and we moms all sat on the side and chatted. THAT, my friends, is my idea of a great time. :-) 

Happy Birthday to our big girl! We love you Cait!

First Day of School! First Day of School!

As much as we totally loved the preschool we did during the summer where all three kids and I stayed the whole time, it was pretty challenging for me to monitor Nathan, hold/nurse Benjamin, and also run a station or do the snack. I was tense and exhausted by the end of every preschool day. So...

Last week Caitlyn had her first day of preschool at Jones Elementary!

In San Diego the coat and backpack hooks are outside. And why not, when the weather is great pretty much every day of the entire year?

This is Miss Barbie. Another family in our ward who's had two of her boys in Miss Barbie's class recommended this preschool to us and said Miss Barbie is fantastic. So far we haven't been disappointed.

Yes, Caitlyn is eating breakfast. Nice that they serve the kids breakfast! Quinn drops her off at 7:15 on his way to work, and he loves the daddy-daughter time. He says Caitlyn is a little chatterbox and talks his ear off the whole way to school.

When we left on the first day of school, Caitlyn had already pulled out a puzzle and barely looked up to say goodbye. No time to waste, people!